like a worm on the hook

I posted here about St Cyprian and the notion of Christ as the bait with which God lured death onto his hook. And I posted here about the image of God fishing for Leviathan in Herrad von Landsburg's Hortus Deliciarum. Since then I've found a fascinating article on 'divine deception' in the writing of the Church Fathers. It's by Nicholas P. Constas and it appeared in 2004.

As Constas shows, the image of the fishhook and the idea of the passion as a form of deception appear in a great many texts and were not conjured up from nowhere:

[They were] derived from a theologically consistent conflation of several biblical passages, including Job 40-41; Psalms 104:26 (LXX 103:26); and Isaiah 27:1, all of which are concerned with mocking the cosmic dragon and dragging him up from the depths of the sea on a fishhook. Moreover, one does not typically go fishing in mythopoetic ponds without a worm, and so Psalms 22:6 (LXX 21:6, "I am a worm and not a man") was granted a central place in this tradition. Tied to Psalm 22, the fishhook was thereby anchored to the center of the Passion Narrative itself, for when Christ cried out in dereliction from the cross, it was this psalm's first verse which he chose to give voice to his pain. Patristic exegetes were thus confronted with the striking image of the crucified Christ writhing like a worm on a hook.

Constas also quotes Pseudo-Chrysostom, who says:

[J]ust like a wise fisherman ,it was necessary that he place his flesh like a worm on the brilliantly shining fishhook of his divinity, and cast it into the depths of this world, and thus catch the dragon on a hook, so that what was written in Job might come to pass, 'Thou wilt catch the dragon with a fish hook' (Job 40:25)" (PG 64:23, l 20-32).

What an astonishing image and what a very different culture it evidently comes from. The idea of God as perpetrating a deception or a trick is difficult for the contemporary reader but to the Church Fathers was 'a corollary of the World's encryption in the flesh, the veiling of the unspeakable Name in the deceptive utterances of language'. There is a trickiness at the centre of the incarnation and it is figured in these strange, even shocking, images.

hei matau

In the mythology of Polynesia the tools and craft of fishing have an important place. Throughout the Pacific Islands, there are stories of the culture hero, Maui, who pulled the various island groups - Hawaii, Aotearoa, and Tonga - up from the sea with a hook.

The details vary from place to place. In Hawaii, for example, he goes fishing with his brothers and, every time his hook lodges in the seafloor, he urges them to row as fast as possible. They, of course, think he is pulling a series of enormous fish from the ocean but, as they row, the hook is in fact pulling up the seabed to create the islands of the Hawaiian group. In Tonga there is a different story in which Maui hears that the chief of Manuka in Samoa has a hook that he uses to pull up land. Maui goes to ask for the hook and Tui-Manuka, the chief, says that he can have it if he can identify it among the many fishhooks he has in his house. Maui has inside knowledge (from the wife of the chief) and knows that the hook he wants is the plainest and least ostentatious. He takes it and with it fishes up the islands of Tonga, which are named after the Samoan chief. (His personal name is Tonga Fusi Forua.) In Aotearoa, the north island is a fish that Maui hauled up using the jaw-bone of his grandmother, Muri Ranga Whenua, while the south island is Maui's canoe.

Hooks are of particular significance. In his book, Iconography of New Zealand Maori Religion, D.R. Simmons says:

The jade, greenstone ornament, the Hei Matau, is a very important form. It was worn by graduates of the highest leel of whare wananga [a sacred institution of learning]. The form of the book can vary from realistic to quite abstract. The name for the hook in Maori is matau which is also the word for knowledge. The hook is a spiral form which is light, the line is aho which is also breath or genealogy. At another level Hei Matau represents the hook with which Maui fished up the islands.

In Roger Keverne's book, Jade, there is an essay which discusses the Hei Matau, describing it as 'a superb example of Maori art in that it combines fish hook and fish motif in one simple design.' A graphic form that is both fish and hook seems to evoke so much of what we have said about the relationship between hunter and hunted. I wish I knew who had written the essay and, as soon as I find out, I'll look at more of what s/he has to say about this motif. In the meantime, perhaps it is enough to contemplate the beauty of the stylised hook-that-is-a-fish and the iconographic power that it wields.

This image is by Matt Biddulph and is used under Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 2.0.  It appears on Flickr here: http:// www. flickr.com/ photos/ mbiddulph/ 3296237034.

can the fish love the fisherman?

Here is a poem about the lack of wisdom that old age can show - it appears first in its original form and then in an English translation:

Scis te captari, scis hunc qui captat, avarum, 
et scis qui captat quid, Mariane, velit. 
tu tamen hunc tabulis heredem, stulte, supremis 
scribis et esse tuo vis, furiose, loco. 
"Munera magna tamen misit." sed misit in ha mo;
et piscatorem piscis amare potest? 
hicine deflebit vero tua fata dolore? 
si cupis, ut ploret, des, Mariane, nihil.

You you are angled for, you know this fellow who angles is greedy, and you know, Marianus, what your angler wants; yet you write him down your heir, you fool, by your last will, and are willing he should step - you madman! - into your shoes. "Yet the presents he sent me were magnificent." But he sent them on a hook; and can a fish love the fisherman? Will this man weep for your death with genuine grief? If you want him to lament, leave him, Marianus, nothing.

This is Martial (86-103 AD), the great author of epigrams whose short sharp poems skewer the failings of the urban culture of Rome under the emperors. As in the Buddhist text, the Balisika Sutta, wisdom lies in swimming past the baited hooks. But here the hooks are - at least in the opinion of Marianus' adviser - dropped by the ambitious young man who wants the old man's fortune. It's a familiar story: the older person who needs companionship and the younger one who needs money.

Can we trust the adviser himself, though? The little dialogue shows him in action, arguing with the old man's optimism: '"The presents he sent me were magnificent." But he sent them on a hook.' Is he himself a rival for Marianus' fortune? Another fisherman?

The epigram-within-an-epigram - can a fish love the fisherman? - is quoted by one of the well-wishers whose poems begin the fifth edition of The Compleat Angler, Christopher Harvey, who sees Walton's book as 'hooking' the reader into the contemplation of a wide range of significant maters. In that poem, the answer to the question is 'yes', the fish should love the fisherman. But I prefer the nastiness of Martial - the warning that behind the gifts lie hooks and my own suspicion that Marianus' adviser is seeing off the opposition.

Photograph by Retama (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons.

obo-ti, susu-ti, madi-ti, uru-ti

It's time to finish the story of Po-deri and Po-wori (which I wrote about here and here). Having lost his brother's fish hook, Po-wori was moping by on the water's edge. There he came upon Sipo-Tuti-Nö-Kami, the Brine-Spirit Deity, who gave him a boat and told him to travel to the palace of Wata-Tu-Mi-Nö-Kami, the Sea-Spirit Deity. On arriving there, he said, Po-wori would see a large katura tree. He should climb it and await instructions.

This Po-wori did, and, as he sat in the tree, the hand-maid of the sea god's daughter came out of the palace to draw water from the well. She offered him a basin of water to quench his thirst and he, taking one of the jewels that he had upon his person, put it in his mouth and then spat it out again into the basin where it stuck to the side so that it couldn't be moved. The hand-maid told the princess what had happened and she told her father, who recognised Po-wori and invited him to be his daughter's husband.

Po-wori lived in the Sea-Spirit Deity's palace for three years but eventually his thoughts turned again to the loss of his brother's fish hook. So his father-in-law called together all the sea creatures and asked them if they had any idea what had happened to it. They confirmed that the sea bream had been complaining of having something stuck in her throat and so they called her to the palace and, sure enough, when she opened her mouth there was Po-deri's hook.

The Sea-Spirit Deity told Po-wori that, when he gave the fish-hook back to Po-deri, he should say to him: 'This hook is a gloomy hook, an uneasy hook, a poor hook, a dull hook' (obo-ti, sasu-ti, madi-ti, uru-ti) and he should hand it over with his hand behind his back. These words and this action would constitute a curse and part of a larger pattern of conduct designed to ruin Po-deri entirely:

[I]f your elder brother makes a high rice paddy, make a low paddy. If your elder brother makes a low paddy, make a high paddy. Thus, since I control the water, within three years your elder brother will be poverty-stricken. If he becomes bitter and angry and attacks you, take the tide-raising jewel and cause him to drown. If he pleads with you in anguish, take the tide-ebbing jewel and cause him to live. Doing this cause him anguish and suffering.

After offering this advice, the Sea-Spirit Deity sent Po-wori back to the shore with a crocodile to look after him on the journey.  Po-wori did as he had been instructed and things turned out as the Sea-Spirit Deity had said, the elder brother losing all his wealth and coming close to drowning until the younger granted him his life with the power of the tide-ebbing jewel. Faced with the inevitability of ruin, Po-deri eventually submitted to  Po-wori's will and declared that, from then on, he would be his brother's guard by day and his servant by night.

According to the commentators (Matsumura and, following him, Philippi), the story reflects the ascendancy of the Yamato dynasty over other groups in southern Japan. (Po-wori is represented in the Kojiki as the grandfather of the first Emperor, Jimmu.) What is particularly interesting is the final line of the story: 'Down to the present day his various posturings when drowning are ceaselessly served up.' This point is made at greater length in another early Shinto collection, the Nihon Shoki:

At this the elder brother put on a waist-cloth, rubbed red clay on his palms and on his face, and said to his younger brother: 'I have defiled my body thus, I will be your mime for ever.' Then he raised up his feet and stamped them in imitation of his drowning painfully. At first, when the tide covered his feet, he did the foot-divination; when it reached his thighs, he ran around; when it reached his waist, he rubbed his waist; when it reached his under-arms, he put his hands on his breast; and when it reached his neck, he raised up his hands and waved them about. From that time until now, this has never ceased.

In The Japanese Theatre from Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism, Benito Ortolani reiterates the point about the ascendancy of the Yamato dynasty and associates Po-deri's dance with that of the Hayato clan from Kyūshū, who '[o]n the occasion of festivals and banquets' would smear themselves with scarlet earth and 'perform comic pantomimes of their defeat'. 'This dance,' he adds, 'the original Hayato-mai, was probably meant as a renewal of the promise of obedience to the conquerors.'

Thus, the story of Po-wori and Po-deri is presented in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki as a part of the mythology of the ruling Yamato clan. But, at the same time, it seems reductive to see the convoluted tale of the brothers' dispute as merely some kind of  historical aetiology. The elder brother's intransigence and the younger's revenge seem to dramatise some dark insight into the nature of social order and the politics of expertise. And how strange that the curse laid upon the fisherman is to spend the years dancing the scene of his own drowning. Po-deri should simply have accepted the replacement hooks. But then how could he? His fate was fixed when Po-wori first suggested that they trade 'luck' and try their hands at each other's allotted roles.














Hatō zu (Waves). Woodcut print after Konen Uehara, dating from between 1900 and 1920. Image by …trialsanderrors (Konen Uehara: Waves, ca. 1910) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

leviathan

I wrote here about St Cyprian's image of God overcoming death with a hook concealed in the body of Christ. The extraordinary drawing below derives from the Hortus Deliciarum - an illuminated work by the 12th-century abbess of the Hohenburg Abbey, Herrad von Landsburg - and it realises very much the same figure in graphic form. The creature at the bottom is Leviathan - the sea-monster of the Hebrew Bible and the text that I've placed beside the picture - it doesn't appear in the Hortus - is the speech by which God reminds Job of the extent of his power in the book of Job 41: 1-10:

Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? Or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?
Canst thou put an hook into his nose? Or bore his jaw through with a thorn?

Will he make many supplications unto thee? Will he speak soft words unto thee?
Will he make a covenant with thee? Wilt thou take him for a servant for ever?
Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? O wilt thou bind him for thy maidens?

Shall the companions make a banquet of him? Shall they part him among the merchants?
Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? Or his head with fish spears?

Lay thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more.
Behold, the hope of him is in vain: shall not one be cast down even at the sight of him?
None is so fierce that dare stir him up: who then is able to stand before me?

At the top of the drawing, God demonstrates exactly this power to 'draw out leviathan with a hook', and, as in Cyprian's image, the bait is Christ.  But along the line here are the heads of the patriarchs and this is appropriate for a drawing that stands between the Old and New Testament pictures, a sign of continuity and connection bridging the progressive stages of the covenant.

the fish that first cometh up

Chapter 17 of the Gospel of Matthew describes a small incident that does not appear in any of the other three. Jesus and the disciplines come to Capernaum and are asked for the usual payment as a tribute to the temple. (Hendrik van der Loos points to the book of Exodus (30: 11-16) for the law that 'all male Israelites above the age of twenty were obliged to give half a shekel for the service in the tabernacle of the congregation'.) Jesus asks Peter: 'What thinkest thou, Simon? Of whom do the kings of the earth take custom or tribute? Of their children, or of strangers?' Peter says: 'Of strangers'. And Jesus concludes by saying, 'Then are the children free', which is often interpreted as meaning that, being children of heaven, the disciples are strangers to the authorities in Capernaum and hence have no obligation to them.

Then, however, Jesus takes a different line: '[L]est we should offend them, go thou to the sea, and cast an hook, and take up the fish that first cometh up; and when thou hast opened his mouth, thou shalt find a piece of money: that take, and give unto them for me and thee.' It's a rather strange detail. Although it is sometimes included among the miracles, we are not told that Peter did as he was told. No miraculous event is described as taking place. Some have rationalised it by saying that Peter is to catch a fish and sell it, thus raising money to pay the temple tribute. A fragment in Joseph Reuss' collection, Matthaus-Kommentare aus der griechischen Kirche, offers an allegorical account of the episode:

[T]he fish provides a type of the church: once [it was] held by the brine of faithlessness and superstition, submerged in the depths of the sea and swamped by the storms and distress of worldly pleasures. But now [it is] raised up by the apostles' hook of teaching and the fishing nets of the Word to the knowledge of God, of him 'who calls us from darkness to his amazing light'.

Thus, the episode is read as a reference to the status of the disciples as 'fishers of men' and we can add it to our collection of allegorical hooks - that of Mara (which catches those who have not managed to put aside sensual desire), that of the Christian God (which captures death through the bait that is Jesus), and that of the teaching used by the disciples to bring their listeners to 'knowledge of God'.

Some commentators see the story as borrowed from another tradition - a folkloric element that has cognates in all kinds of other places. It has been compared with a range of other stories. One appears in the Babylonian Talmud:

Joseph-who-honours-the-Sabbaths had in his victory a certain gentile who owned much property. Soothsayers told him, 'Joseph-who-honours-the-Sabbaths will consume all your property. — [So] he went, sold all his property, and bought a precious stone with the proceeds, which he set in his turban. As he was crossing a bridge the wind blew it off and cast it into the water, [and] a fish swallowed it. [Subsequently] it [the fish] was hauled up and brought [to market] on the Sabbath eve towards sunset. 'Who will buy now?' cried they. 'Go and take them to Joseph-who-honours-the-Sabbaths,' they were told, 'as he is accustomed to buy.' So they took it to him. He bought it, opened it, found the jewel therein, and sold it for thirteen roomfuls of gold denarii.  A certain old man met him [and] said, 'He who lends to the Sabbath,  the Sabbath repays him.' [link]

Another appears in Herodotus' Histories in the story of the ring of Polycrates (which I might look at in another post). Both the Talmudic and the Herodotian stories are centred upon loss and restoration, a dynamic that is not so evident in the Gospel story. To lose something in the sea is to lose it more or less irrecoverably and so the rediscovery of the jewel and the ring are particularly striking signs of the virtue and good fortune of Joseph and Polycrates respectively.

I have to say that I like some of the stranger moments in the texts of the Gospels. (The cursing of the fig tree in both Mark and Matthew is another one.) There is something compelling about watching the commentators worry about the significance of the coin in the fish's mouth.

Augustin Tünger Facetiae Latinae et Germanicae, Konstanz 1486, Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart, Cod. HB V 24a. - Illustration from the life of St. Peter: Saint Peter paying a fee by extracting coins from the mouth of a fish.

real

I was talking to my friend Jon yesterday and he was telling me about how his father used to take him fishing when he was a young lad. He talked in particular about the moment when you land a fish and have to grab hold of it, remove the hook, and return it to the water. 

In his introduction to coarse fishing, Paul Duffield offers a methodical account of this process. 'Be careful when unhooking fish,' he says, 'not to grip them too tightly, and only handle them with damp hands to prevent removal of slime.' It is relatively easy, if seems, to free a fish when the hook is in the lip, although to release a barbed hook you may need to shake it a little as you pull it out, and you might also need to use forceps 'if the fish is hooked deeper in the mouth and you cannot reach it with your fingers'. If the fish swallows the hook, you have to use a disgorger and Duffield emphasises the need to be able to lay hands on one quickly. You slide it onto the line, push it down until it reaches the hook and then a bit further so the hook comes free. Then you 'turn the disgorger by about 25 degrees and pull it back out of the fish'. This isn't difficult, he says, but you do need some practice. 

You also have to follow certain procedures in releasing the fish, not throwing it back but placing it into the water 'nose first' and letting it swim away. Some fish actually need to rest in the water for a moment, held in your hands until they are ready to head off into the river or pond.

Jon talked about the experience of seeing all this happen for the first time (or first few times). You have a responsibility at that moment and the suddenness of it, the need to act quickly, to treat the fish humanely, to get it all right has the potential to make a big impression on a child. As Jon put it, it all feels very real. 

Some moments do seem particularly real. Sitting in the corridor at the Hallamshire Hospital back in November, waiting to find out the status of the mole on the side of my nose, I experienced such a moment and that sense of reality receded again when I found that it was benign. Oddly, the realness of that moment arose from the sense of what might happen - something not yet real - and so the vividness of certain moments has quite a complex structure. I wonder if there is something of that with the child's reaction to the fish - the future crowding into the present as the creature fights for breath in front of you. For the moment, let's just imagine the young boy confronted with a fish on a line, reaching out with wet hands to take hold of it and set it free again.

Unhooking a salmon. Image adapted from a photograph by Des Colhoun [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

back on the hook

I posted here about the story of Hoderi and Howori, the two brothers in the Kojiki, one who 'finds his luck' in the mountains and the other on the sea. The crux of the story is that they exchange their 'luck' and, when Howori goes fishing with Hoderi's tackle, fails to catch any fish and loses the hook in the waves. When I first wrote about this, I found Hoderi's intransigence over the lost hook annoying. Howori breaks up his sword and makes five hundred hooks to replace the old one. But Hoderi is having none of it and insists on the return of the original. Since then, however, I've consulted a newer edition of the Kojiki - not 'new' exactly, just newer than Chamberlain's - and learned a little more about it.

First of all, more recent work on the phonology of Old Japanese apparently shows that the syllable which Chamberlain transcribes as 'ho' was actually pronounced 'po', so we should really call the brothers Po-deri and Po-wori. Second, there is some discussion in this newer edition of exactly why Po-deri is so insistent on the return of the hook:

The meaning of the word sati in this chapter is vital. Even today the word shachi, a divine blessing or magic power, is used among hunters to refer to luck in the hunt. This 'luck' can be gained and imparted by certain magic practices, and the magic is thought to dwell in the hunting implements - for the modern hunter, the rifle bullets, which are shachi-dama ('luck balls')

This point is underlined in a discussion of the folklore of hunting by the German scholar of Japan, Nelly Naumann. (Apologies for the rather stilted translation!)

The word shachi is often used in the language of hunting. We'll meet shachi-iwai or shachi-matsuri as a thanksgiving ceremony after the killing of wild game. The term shachi-ya means an arrow with which an animal was hit, while shachi-dama or shachi-maru is the bullet with which an animal was killed ... ; shachi-no-mi is venison. If a bullet kills an animal on the first shot, one says shachi ga mukaita, 'the shachi obliged'. However, if one has missed the target several times, one says sono mono no gu wa shachi no kiretari, 'the shachi of this gear is exhausted'. And if one doesn't shachi wo tsugu quickly - 'replace the shachi' - the equipment becomes useless.

Seen in this light Po-deri's demands seem more reasonable: 'The stubborn refusal of the elder brother to accept any but the original hook did not necessarily stem from perversity'. The hook is a talismanic object and 'separation from [it] might mean a complete loss of luck and economic ruin'. One's success at one's trade is closely bound up with the use of the tools that have served one well so far. And the luck is not transferable - your hook is lucky for you but will not be so for me.

I'm tempted to read this in relation to that tension between, on the one hand, what happens to you and, on the other, what you do for yourself. The focus on the hook is somehow emblematic of the need to pay attention to the detail of equipment, while acknowledging that these preparations set up the conditions to receive good fortune. What is perhaps rather shocking, though, is how this story continues. Things do not, in the end, go Po-deri's way. But I'll come to that another time!

     

     Angling in Modern Japan: Awaji Island

saturday night, sunday morning

Kate responded to my post on the Buddhist sutra about the Mara The Fisherman with a quotation from Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night, Sunday Morning. As she says, 'The baited hook is the key metaphor at the end of [the novel] to indicate surrender to "everyday life".' I liked this so much I wanted to foreground it by putting it in a post.

He drank tea from the flask and ate a cheese sandwich, then sat back to watch the red and white float - up to its waist in water under the alder trees - and keep an eye always close to it for the sudden indication of a fortunate catch. For himself, his own catch had been made, and he would have to wrestle with it for the rest of his life. Whenever you caught a fish, the fish caught you, in a way of speaking, and it was the same with anything else you caught, like the measles or a woman. Everyone in the world was caught, somehow, one way or another, and those that weren't were always on the way to it. (pp 216)

This is Ian McKellen performing the final soliloquy of the stage adaptation of Saturday Night, Sunday Morning at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1964.

the demon fisherman

There is a Buddhist text called 'The Fisherman' - 'Balisika Sutta'. It is part of a collection of scriptures that originated early in the history of Buddhism and is written in Pali, a South Asian language close to that which the Buddha himself spoke. The sutta begins with an analogy:

[J]ust as if a fisherman were to cast a baited hook into a deep lake and a fish with its eye out for food would swallow it — so that the fish that had thus swallowed the fisherman's hook would fall into misfortune & disaster, and the fisherman could do with it as he will — in the same way, there are these six hooks in the world for the misfortune of beings, for the slaughter of those that breathe.

The six hooks turn out to be associated with the senses as they are conceptualised by the tradition. These include the five that we are familiar with - sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell - as well as the intellect, which is conceived in Buddhist psychology as a six 'sense'.The text explains how each of the senses perceives the bait on a particular hook.The quotation below is what it says about sight - the comments on the other senses are similar. (In the earlier phase of Buddhism a lot of emphasis was placed on monasticism and this is why the sutta addresses and talks about the 'bikkhavo' or monks.) 

There are forms, monks, cognizable via the eye — agreeable, pleasing, charming, endearing, fostering desire, enticing. If a monk relishes them, welcomes them, & remains fastened to them, he is said to be a monk who has swallowed Mara's hook, who has fallen into misfortune & disaster. The Evil One can do with him as he will.

Mara is a demon who appears in a number of the suttas and famously tried to tempt the Buddha away from his contemplative practice. He is not exactly evil - more a symbol of the distraction that the sensory world offers to the anyone following the contemplative path. Rather than characterising the objects of the senses as the bait on Mara's hooks, other suttas depict them as the demon's beautiful daughters.

At the centre of Buddhist throught is the idea that dukkha, the suffering of life, is conquered by letting go of 'attachment' - desire, appetite, yearning, envy. We erroneously believe that the objects of our desire will bring us happiness (or, if we have them already, that our present happiness is conditional upon them). So, in a sense, they are like the bait on the demon's hooks. They seem to offer fufilment but, in reality, lure you into danger. The solution is ... well, the solution is complex but it includes contemplation, particularly meditation that trains us to be more fully present as life unfolds and not always away in hypothetical worlds where everything would be better - or would have been better - 'if only...'.

Image of Mara Demons (unfortunately without fishing rods). Picture by Anonymous 11th century artist. Digital image provided by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

the hook of the godhead

Reading about brandlings made me think about the image of the baited hook. And that led me back into the more metaphorical space where religious texts express their conception of things with reference to the dynamics of fishing. In Aion (which has the subtitle, 'researches into the phenomenology of the self') C.G. Jung has much to say about fish as symbols and a little too about the activity of fishing. He talks about the 'primitive totemistic identity between hunter and prey', citing the examples of 'the Babylonian culture-hero Oannes', who 'was himself a fish', and the 'Christian Ichthys', who is 'a fisher of men par excellence'. Then, complicating the picture, he says of Christ-Ichthys, 'Symbologically, he is actually the hook or bait on God's fishing-rod with which the Leviathan - death or the devil - is caught'.

There is a slightly paradoxical quality to this image. Passiontide is a dark time in the Christian calendar but, nevertheless, the death of Christ is seen as needing to take place in order to bring about redemption. And so, in Jung's interpretation, God is characterised as offering Jesus as bait or as a lure to death and the devil so that - when they bite - they will be defeated. In a footnote to the text he cites St Cyprian, the third-century bishop of Carthage:

Like a fish which darts at a baited hook, and not only does not lay hold of the bait along with it, but is itself hauled out of the sea; so he who had the power of death did indeed snatch away the body of Jesus unto death, but did not observe that the hook of the Godhead was concealed therein, until he had devoured it; and thereupon remained fixed thereto.

These kinds of comparisons work with particular aspects of the act of fishing in order to communicate specific points of religious thought. In this case the wisdom of God is seen as, in some sense, 'tricky', exploiting the avaricious, even voracious, quality of evil against itself. (In The Conference of the Birds, conversely, it was the quality of attentive waiting that I think became the figural centre of the teaching.)

I'd like to keep these more metaphorical texts in play, even while we engage with ones that are more 'literal' - more descriptive of fishing as experienced today - because these too work with the actuality of the act to speak about what wisdom is and does. Having looked at a Christian example today, I'll move on tomorrow to think about the meanings of baited hooks in the wisdom literature of Buddhism.

  

St Cyprian at the Water's Edge

luck on the sea, luck in the mountains

The Kojiki is a Shinto text - a compilation of mythological material assembled by imperial command in early 8th-century Japan. In volume I, section 39 we learn the story of two brothers, 'His Augustness Fire-Shine' (the elder one) and 'His Augustness Fire-Subside' (the younger). The first translator of the Kojiki, Basil Hall Chamberlain, chose these as translations of the Japanese names Ho-deri-no-mikoto and and Ho-wori-no-mikoto, so we can also call them Hoderi and Howori.

Chamberlain described the story as 'a very curious legend' and it is, indeed, hard to know how to read it. Hoderi and Howori have something in common with Walton's Piscator and Venator, in that the former is entirely committed to fishing and the latter to hunting. Chamberlain says that Hoderi 'got his luck on the sea' and Howori 'in the mountains', adding a little more about the term 'luck' in a footnote:

For the archaic Japanese word sachi, here rendered 'luck,' there is no satisfactory English equivalent. Its original and most usual significance is 'luck,' 'happiness;' then that which a man is lucky in or skillful at, - his 'forte;' and finally that which he procures by his luck or skill and the implements which he uses in procuring it.

The crux of the story is that Hoderi and Howori decide to swap their 'luck'. The idea comes from the younger brother, the hunter, and initially the fisherman, is reluctant. But in the end Howori prevails and goes down to the sea to see what he can catch. The text does not tell us how Hoderi got on in the mountains but Howori was a failure as a fisherman. He 'never got a single fish' and, what is more, 'he lost the fish hook in the sea'.

The elder brother, who now emerges as a rather austere figure, suggests that they end the experiment: 'A mountain-luck is a luck of its own and a sea-luck is a luck of its own. Let each of us now restore to the other his luck.' In another footnote, Chamberlain interprets this as an assertion of the need to accept what is naturally so and he glosses Hoderi's speech in a way that resembles the most stultifying bureaucratese: 'Some men are naturally good hunters and others naturally good fishermen. Let us therefore restore to each other the implements necessary to the successful following of our avocations.'  Howori is not, of course, in a position to return the implement necessary to the successful following of his brother's avocation because he has lost it in the waves. He tries to make amends by breaking up his sword and fashioning five hundred new fish hooks from it but Hoderi, who sounds increasingly priggish, insists that he wants the original.

The next section of the Kojiki explains how Howori managed to recover the hook and we'll come to that another time. But what have we gleaned from the story so far? Is it a tale about wisdom? A rather conservative tale perhaps? People should stick to the sphere that is ordained for them? Do not start fishing if you aren't a fisherman to start with? There must be some material on the story hidden away in the murky depths of the library - lost like Hoderi's hook. When I have a moment, I'll go down there and look for it.